Wm. Shakspere, deliver thees,' asking the loan of thirty pounds
`uppon Mr. Bushells and my securytee,' showing that Shakspere
had money to lend), and finally turns it into the ideal in `The Tempest';
if we compare, I say, Greene, Marlowe, Nash, with Shakspere,
surely the latter is a whole heaven above them in the music of his verse,
as well as in the temperance and prudence of his life, as well also
as in the superb height of his later moral ideals. Surely, in fine,
there is a point of mere technic in art beyond which nothing but
moral greatness can attain, because it is at this point that the moral range,
the religious fervor, the true seership and prophethood of the poet,
come in and lift him to higher views of all things."*
--
* `Shakspere and His Forerunners', vol. ii, p. 324.
--
Lanier frequently indulged in little homilies, -- "preachments"
Thackeray would call them. They were lectures on life
as well as on literature in its more technical sense. Two passages indicate
a poet's feeling for nature, especially his love of trees: --
"But besides the phase of Nature-communion which we call physical science,
there is the other, artistic phase. Day by day we find
that the mystic influence of Nature on our human personality
grows more intense and individual. Who can walk alone
in your beautiful Druid Hill Park, among those dear and companionable oaks,
without a certain sense of being in the midst of a sweet and noble
company of friends? Who has not shivered, wandering among these trees,
with a certain sense that the awful mysteries which the mother earth
has brought with her out of the primal times are being sucked up
through those tree-roots and poured upon us out of branch and leaf
in vague showers of suggestions that have no words in any language?
Who, in some day when life has seemed TOO bitter, when man has seemed
too vile, when the world has seemed all old leather and brass,
when some new twist of life has seemed to wrench the soul
beyond all straightening, -- who has not flown, at such a time,
to the deep woods, and leaned against a tree, and felt his big arms outspread
like the arms of the preacher that teaches and blesses,
and slowly absorbed his large influences, and so recovered one's self
as to one's fellow-men, and gained repose from the ministrations
of the Oak and the Pine?"*
--
* `Shakspere and His Forerunners', vol.
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